Editorial Board

Editorial Board

Manal Alaamery, King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Saudi Arabia

Jessy Alexander, University at Buffalo, USA

Lis Antonelli, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil

Philip Askenase, Yale Medical School, USA

Calum Bain, University of Edinburgh, UK

Alexandre Basso, University of São Paulo, Brazil

Paul Beavis, Peter Maccallum Cancer Centre, Australia

Mats Bemark, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Vuk Cerovic, RWTH Aachen, Germany

Seth Coffelt, Beatson Institute, UK

John Cole, University of Glasgow, UK

Carrie Cowardin, University of Virginia, USA

Anna Dimberg, Uppsala University, Sweden

Walderez Dutra, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil

Karen Edelblum, Rutgers University, USA

Kathryn Else, University of Manchester, UK

Keke Fairfax, University of Utah, USA

Cybele Garcia, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

Marcus Geuking, University of Calgary, USA

Matthew Hepworth, University of Manchester, USA

Jayne Hope, University of Edinburgh, UK

Javier Irazoqui, University of Massachusetts, US

Nicole Joller, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Andrew Kau, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

Tony Kenna, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Bruce MacLachlan, Cardiff University, UK

Megan MacLeod, University of Glasgow, UK

Laura Mackay, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Australia

Iris Mair, University of Edinburgh, UK

Elizabeth Mann, University of Manchester, UK

Christine Maritz-Olivier, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Johannes Mayer, Marburg University, Germany

Neil McCarthy, Queen Marys University London, UK

Kathy McCoy, University of Calgary, Canada

Dirk Mielenz, Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen, Germany

Henry Mwandumba, Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme, Malawi

Masahiro Ono, Imperial College London, UK

Laura Pallett, University College London, UK

David Pozo Perez, CABIMER, Spain

Georgia Perona-Wright, University of Glasgow, UK

Rahul Roychoudhuri, Cambridge University, UK

Andreas Schlitzer, University of Bonn, Germany

Charlotte Scott, VIB, Belgium

Isabelle Schwartz, INRAE (Research for Agriculture, Food and Environment), Paris, France

Tim Willinger, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Leng-Siew Yeap, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, China

Biographies and Specialisms

Professor Simon Milling

Simon Milling is a Professor of Immunology and Deputy Head of the Centre for Immunobiology at the Institute of Infection, Immunity & Inflammation at the University of Glasgow. He received his PhD from Imperial College London, where he studied antigen presentation to human T cell clones under Professor Robert Lechler and Dr Sara Brett. Professor Milling then went on to work as a postdoctoral researcher in Philadelphia and Oxford before joining the University of Glasgow as a lecturer in 2007. He became a professor at the university in 2017 and became the Deputy Head of Immunology in 2020. 

His research focuses on the biology of antigen-presenting cells in the intestine and on how these cells respond to infectious or inflammatory stimuli. The aim of this work is to understand the vital roles that antigen-presenting cells play, both in the induction and polarisation of adaptive immune responses against pathogens and in the pathology of inflammatory diseases.

Dr Sophie Acton

Dr. Sophie Acton is a Professor of Immunology at University College London (UCL) and leads a research group at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology. She completed her undergraduate studies in Pharmacology at the University of Bath, followed by a year at Millennium Pharmaceuticals.

Her postdoctoral research began at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School, where she studied dendritic cell migration. Returning to London, she undertook a second postdoc with Caetano Reis e Sousa, focusing on lymph node expansion mechanisms. Supported by a Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship, she established her independent research group at UCL in 2016.

Dr Philip Ahern

Philip Ahern is an Assistant Professor at the Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland, USA. He studied Industrial Biochemistry at the University of Limerick before completing his D.Phil. in Immunology at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Fiona Powrie and Professor Kevin Maloy. Dr Ahern went on to complete his post doctoral training at the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University in St. Louis where his work focused on understanding intestinal immune-microbiome interactions.

Since 2018 he has been an Assistant Professor at the Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic, where his lab focuses on understanding how homeostasis between the intestinal immune system and the gut microbiota is established and maintained, and how disruption of this relationship leads to the development and exacerbation of inflammatory bowel disease.

Professor Awen Gallimore

Awen Gallimore is a professor at Cardiff University and Co-Director of Systems Immunity Research Institute. She gained a DPhil in Professor Andrew McMichael's lab in Oxford, studying T cell responses to SIV and HIV before moving to Zurich to further study the factors governing anti-viral immunity under Professor Rolf Zinkernagel.

She then went on to establish her own lab in Oxford where they were among the first to demonstrate that regulatory T cells inhibited effective anti-cancer T cell responses. Professor Gallimore moved to Cardiff University in 2002, becoming a professor at the Division of Infection and Immunity in 2013, focusing on basic immunology and pre-clinical animal models of cancer.

Her research focuses on the regulation of anti-cancer immunity, with a particular interest in regulatory T cells (Tregs). The aim is to identify and overcome the barriers to successful immunotherapy by understanding how Tregs can be disabled to promote tumour immunity. Her lab is also interested in how a type of blood vessel called high endothelial venules can be manipulated to allow immune cells to better target tumours.

Dr Florent Ginhoux

Florent Ginhoux is a senior principal investigator at the Singapore Immunology Network (SigN), A*STAR. He is also Adjunct Visiting Associate Professor in the Shanghai Immunology Institute at Jiao Tong University, China and at Gustave-Roussy in Paris. He received his PhD in 2004 from the University Pierre et Marie CURIE, Paris VI, before going on to become a postdoctoral fellow at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM) studying ontogeny and the homeostasis of cutaneous dendritic cell populations. He went on to become an assistant professor at MSSM before joining Singapore Immunology Network (SigN), A*STAR as Principal Investigator in 2009.

He has been an EMBO Young Investigator (YIP) since 2013 and is a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher since 2016.

His current research focuses on the ontogeny and differentiation of macrophages and dendritic cells in both human and mice, aiming to better understand the roles of these cells in tissue immunity and homeostasis.

Dr Emily Gwyer Findlay

Emily Gwyer Findlay is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Southampton. She gained her PhD at Imperial College London then undertook postdocs at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 she was awarded a Royal Society fellowship to establish her lab in the Centre for Inflammation Research. 

Her group researches how T cells differentiate during inflammatory disease and how the presence of innate immune cells like neutrophils, and their mediators, affect this. She focuses on neutrophil de-granulation and release of antimicrobial peptides and how this alters T cell behaviour in lymph nodes and tissues.

Professor Francisco J Quintana

Francisco J. Quintana is Professor of Neurology at the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and an associate member at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. He received his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2005 before joining Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow where he was advised by Dr Howard L. Weiner. He went on to join the faculty at Harvard Medical School before becoming a professor in 2018 and a Distinguished Professor in Neuroimmunology in 2021.

His research focuses on signalling pathways that control the immune response and neurodegeneration, using advanced genomic and proteomic tools to study the regulation of the immune response in the central nervous system. The aim of this research is to identify novel therapeutic targets and biomarkers for immune-mediated disorders.

Dr Meera Ramanujam         

Meera Ramanujam is Executive Director of immunology and translational research at Aro Biotherapeutics. She has over 20 years’ experience in scientific research and industry. After obtaining her PhD, she completed research placements in the Albert Einstein Medical Center, Columbia University and the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, before transitioning to industry in 2009. Since then she has held several positions within industry, including roles at Roche and Boehringer Ingelheim in the United States, before moving to Aro Biotherapeutics in 2021 to become Executive Director of immunology and translational research.